vSphere 6 Lab Upgrade – Upgrading ESXi 5.5

I tested vSphere 6 quite intensively when it was in beta, but I didn’t ever upgrade my lab – basically because I need a stable environment to work on and I wasn’t sure that I could maintain that with the beta.

Now 6 has been GA a while and I have a little bit of time, I have begun the lab upgrade process. You can see a bit more about my lab hardware over on my lab page.

Checking for driver compatibility

In vSphere 5.5, VMware dropped the drivers for quite a few consumer grade NICs – in 6 they’ve gone a step further and actually blocked quite a few of these using a VIB package. For more information, see this excellent article by Andreas Peetz.

To list the NIC drivers you’re using on your ESXi hosts, use the following command:

As you can see from the results, my HP N54Ls are running 3 NICs, a Broadcom onboard and two Intel PCI NICs. Fortunately the Broadcom chip is supported and the e1000e driver I’m using is compatible with vSphere 6 and is in fact superseded by a native driver package.

Upgrade to ESXi 6 using vSphere Update Manager (VUM)

Open the VUM administration console in the vSphere Client – you can’t do this in the Web Client yet. If you’re in Compliance view, use the link in the top right hand corner to get to the Admin view.

Select the ESXi Images tab, and then select the Import ESXi Image… link